Authors

Research Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Laura Good is a Researcher at the Centre for Workplace Leadership, which has been co-funded by the Commonwealth Government and The University of Melbourne.

Deborah Towns is a Researcher at the Centre for Workplace Leadership, which has been co-funded by the Commonwealth Government and The University of Melbourne.

Jesse E. Olsen is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership, which has been co-funded by the Commonwealth Government and The University of Melbourne. He has also provided advice to the Australian Government Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) as a member of its Flexibility Education Working Group.

Women’s increased participation in the labour force over the past 50 years has outpaced changes to work organisation and social attitudes. This is true for issues of work-life balance, which continue to polarise workers and managers.

This may be one reason why employees often have difficulty accessing flexible work. And where it is made available, working flexibly may still have career repercussions, since using such arrangements is often equated with a lack of career ambition, meaning flexible workers are overlooked for promotion. Indeed, flexible working in poor quality jobs may increase, rather than relieve, stress about work-life balance.

So let’s really change the way we think

A recent article in The Conversation discusses the need to challenge how we perceive women and men’s roles in society, starting with how we talk to our children (and especially our boys).

Similarly, to change our ingrained social and workplace attitudes, we need to assert the value of life outside work and normalise working flexibly for both women and men alike. A large part of this change therefore involves encouraging and helping more men achieve equilibrium between work and life, through flexible working arrangements.

The Australian Government Workplace Gender Equality Agency is encouraging this with its Equilibrium Challenge campaign. The first initiative of the campaign is the production of a series of micro-documentaries. The series follows the journeys of five corporate men embarking on flexible work arrangements. Each week features a new short episode about their pursuit of equilibrium between work and life, whether that entails spending more time with family, less time commuting, or just more time pursuing their dreams.

Increasing flexibility for men is not the entire answer to workplace gender inequality, but it is a necessary and often neglected piece of breaking down the norms and beliefs that impede our progress towards a more just and productive society. Conversations like those taking place in the Equilibrium Man Challenge make a promising start in challenging our preconceptions about work and workers, ultimately dismantling the illusory trade-off between career success and life outside work.